Biker Trials, The (10 page)

Hamel wasn't arrested right away. He was picked up later as the police busted the network. He was charged with the
PCP
sale. While he was awaiting trial, Hamel was arrested a second time. In this case, the police found almost the same amount of
PCP
as he had sold the undercover cop just months earlier. The drug was hidden in a closet in an apartment where Hamel lived with a girlfriend. The couple also kept a very precise scale in their bedroom. In October 1979, Hamel pleaded guilty to all the drug offences and was sentenced to a year in prison.

According to Ronnie Harbour, an informant for investigators in Project Rush, Hamel was already a major drug dealer when he
joined the
SS
gang. Harbour admitted that he himself worked out of El Cid, the same brasserie where Hamel once sold. Harbour was able to move 20 grams of cocaine a night for Hamel. Harbour also told the investigators that by the early 1990s, Boucher, Hamel and Gaetan Comeau, another Hells Angel from the Montreal chapter, had graduated to major drug trafficking and were working as a unit.

Boucher's criminal record after he joined the Hells Angels began to reflect his involvement with the violent gang. In 1988,he was arrested by the Peel Regional Police after attempting to hijack a truck in Mississauga, Ontario, using nothing more than a board with a nail hammered through it. Boucher had the case transferred to Montreal in exchange for a guarantee he would plead guilty. When the case was transferred, Hamel posted a $10,000 bond to secure Boucher's release. Boucher arranged for the bond through his own company, Irazu Inc., which was involved in importing. According to court records, the company was involved in shipping legitimate products from Costa Rica. However, one of its sales representatives in 1991 was Richard Muselle, a senior citizen. Years later, Muselle would try to help the Hells Angels hide millions of dollars in his home when the Nomads learned the police were aware of the apartments they were using to store the millions in cash from drug sales. On the surface, at least, Irazu Inc. was run like a legitimate business and even took a company to court over a dispute concerning coffee beans from Costa Rica. Irazu had sold a large quantity of coffee beans on consignment to another Montreal company and felt it had been cheated $3,300. Boucher's company actually won its case, and a judge awarded the money they were seeking.

Boucher kept his promise to the Ontario court and was sentenced to five months for trying to hijack the truck in Mississauga. He was also placed on two years' probation. A year later, he was arrested for lying to a police officer in Sorel, where
the Montreal chapter kept its bunker. Boucher quickly pleaded guilty to the offence and was given the choice of paying a $200 fine or spending a few months in jail. For some reason, Boucher chose jail and on New Year's Eve, he welcomed a new decade while in the Bordeaux detention center in Montreal. He was released in March 1990. Seven months later he was arrested while carrying a .38-calibre revolver. Again he pleaded guilty. But this time he chose to pay a $900 fine over doing another five months in a provincial detention center. Shortly after his arrest, Boucher claimed to be residing in Halifax. But he later changed the address he provided to the courts to the location of the Hells Angels' bunker in Sorel.

For his 39th birthday, on June 21, 1992, Boucher decided to treat himself and some friends to a ride on his boat. The pleasure craft was stopped by police patrolling the Saint Lawrence River in Sorel, and Boucher was fined $200 for not having a permit for the boat and because some of his passengers were not wearing life jackets. It would be Boucher's only run-in with the law that year, which was remarkable considering he had created the Rockers only months before, a gang of drug dealers who would take his orders and sell his drugs, an indication that his drug trafficking business was flourishing in Montreal.

Two of the first members of the Rockers were Richard and Patrick Lock, a father-and-son team of drug traffickers. Even before they were members of the Rockers, the Locks had reputations as big-time drug dealers in Montreal, and, according to a man named Jean Dubé who turned informant, they were even able to move large quantities of drugs to dealers in Ontario.

Months after forming the Rockers, Boucher was picked up again for a weapons violation. In May 1993, he was pulled over in Anjou, a Montreal suburb, and when the police searched his car they found a prohibited martial arts weapon, a telescopic bar. Again he pleaded guilty before the case went to trial and agreed
to pay a $500 fine. During this time in the 1990s, Boucher frequently listed his address as being at or near the Hells Angels' Sorel bunker. If this was true, Boucher's son, Francis, spent his formative years living either in or next door to the Hells Angels' bunker. In 1994, days before his 19th birthday he proved he could be just like his old man and committed an armed robbery while breaking into a home with two other adolescents. In August 1994, Francis Boucher pleaded guilty and was fined $500 plus 100 hours of community service. Boucher's son, his accomplice Martin Brizard and an unnamed minor got off easy considering they were initially charged with armed robbery and confining the man they were robbing.

But in 1994, Boucher, the father, had a lot more on his mind than his son's petty crimes.

As informants would later spell out in court or in statements, 1994 was the year very clear lines were drawn in what would become the biker gang war. The Hells Angels and in particular Boucher were giving drug dealers an ultimatum: either buy drugs exclusively from us or face dire consequences.

For some, who would later shed light on the early years of the war, a key date was October 19, 1994. Maurice Lavoie had been shot dead in Repentigny just after he made a decision to begin buying his drugs from the Hells Angels instead of the Pelletier Clan. It appeared that the Pelletier Clan was sending a message to the Hells Angels. A 22-year-old woman who was seated in his vehicle next to him survived the attack despite being struck three times by bullets. Just months earlier, Pierre Daoust, a member of the Death Riders and close ally to the Hells Angels, had met with a similar fate. On July 13, 1994, around 10:30 a.m., he was working alone in the motorcycle repair garage he co-owned. He was inside the garage when three people walked in wearing masks
and motorcycle helmets. Two of them walked toward Daoust and, after they made sure it was him, opened fire. He was taken to a hospital where he died about an hour later. At least eight bullets from one gun entered Daoust's body between the shoulder blades, ripping through his lungs and heart. Another six bullets from a different gun went through his stomach and part of his chest. Shots fired from a third gun went through his scrotum and his left thigh. He quickly went into cardiac arrest and bled to death.

Daoust's death is considered by many to have been the first in the biker war. When Lavoie's death followed, it meant two dealers who had chosen to side with the Hells Angels were dead and the conflict was about to boil over. The generally accepted version of events in the underworld is that things really heated up after Lavoie was killed. Some alleged that Boucher retaliated by ordering Sylvain Pelletier dead. Pelletier's friend Patrick Call had been arrested a day after the Lavoie murder, and the Pelletier Clan's fingerprints were all over the homicide scene. Nine days after Lavoie's murder, Pelletier was killed by an explosion from a bomb that had been planted in his Jeep. His girlfriend, who was seven months pregnant at the time, had just stepped out of the
SUV
before it was destroyed.

Several months later, informant Dany Kane would tell his handlers in the
RCMP
that he had heard members of a Hells Angels' puppet gang called the Rowdy Crew, structured along the same lines as the Rockers, had killed Pelletier. The police were already looking at the gang's members as possible suspects. A member of the Rowdy Crew had rented an apartment in front of Pelletier's home and then quickly canceled the lease the day after Pelletier was killed. The Rowdy Crew was a biker gang based in a small city east of Montreal and controlled by various members of the Hells Angels. Exactly who had actually carried out the bombing was an irrelevant point to street dealers in Montreal's
east end. Pelletier's death signaled that, after months of rumors about a possible war, it was now a reality.

Within weeks of Pelletier's death, members of the Alliance called a meeting in a Montreal bar in November and hatched a plot to kill Boucher. The plan was to park a truck full of explosives in front of a restaurant where Boucher was known to hang out and detonate the explosives the moment he got close. Sylvain Pelletier's brother Harold was part of the Alliance meeting along with about a dozen drug dealers interested in seeing Boucher eliminated. Martin Pellerin, a member of the Alliance, was left in charge of placing the dynamite in the truck and making sure the bomb went off when Boucher arrived at the restaurant. Martin Simard, another Alliance member, was willing to finance the operation by paying for the dynamite. Also involved in the conspiracy were Alliance members René Pelletier, Bruno Lévesque, Hubert Lanteigne and a man named Normand Tremblay. The truck was parked in front of the restaurant and the Alliance members waited for Boucher to show up. But he never did. Or at least not before someone working for the city noticed the truck was parked illegally and towed it to a municipal lot. The dynamite was detonated in the lot by someone in the Alliance when no one was around.

By this time Dany Kane had been feeding information to the
RCMP
for a few months. He had been hanging out with Scott Steinert, an aggressive American who appeared to be willing to do anything to be a Hells Angel. Even before the Pelletier bombing, Kane had informed the
RCMP
that Steinert was gathering C4 explosives for the Hells Angels. He also told the
RCMP
that the Hells Angels believed the failed truck-bomb attempt was an effort to kill Boucher and Steinert together as they often met to discuss business at the exact spot where the truck had been parked.

Dany Kane (center, bottom row) hanging out with fellow members of the Rockers. Also in the photo are René Charlebois (right, bottom row), Jean-Guy Bourgoin (left, bottom row).

During his first meeting, in which he decided to turn informant, Kane told his
RCMP
handlers that he had been recruited by David (Wolf) Carroll and Walter (Nurget) Stadnick to preside over three chapters of an Ontario puppet gang called the Demons Keepers. The plan failed miserably. Kane said Carroll had a serious drinking problem and was constantly broke, so the Demons Keepers didn't have the support they needed to intimidate drug dealers in cities like Ottawa, Cornwall and Toronto. Kane also described the men recruited to be Demons Keepers as “imbeciles.”

The plans were shelved during the spring of 1994, and shortly after that, Kane was introduced to Steinert who, by then, was a prospect in the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter. Steinert told Kane about plans he had to expand into places in Ontario like Belleville and Kingston. It was during Kane's second meeting with the
RCMP
, held in the parking lot of a hotel in Ottawa, that he started to talk of what the other Hells Angels thought of Steinert. The American, who apparently had the backing of
Robert (Tiny) Richard, the Hells Angels' national president, and Boucher, was considered greedy and impulsive by the others.

On November 7, 1994, Kane phoned Corporal Verdon and warned him that the Hells Angels were looking to kill a man because he might testify against Steinert in a drug trial. Verdon learned that the man was about to be transferred to the Longueuil courthouse and warned the Sûreté du Québec.

Paul (Sasquatch) Porter, seen here when he was a member of the Rock Machine. (John Mahoney, The Montreal Gazette)

In January 1995, Kane was approached by Steinert about joining the Rockers. Steinert told him it was Boucher himself who was interested in seeing Kane become part of his gang. During that same month, Kane told the
RCMP
that Steinert and Gaetan Comeau, a longtime member of the Hells Angels, had gone out looking for Paul (Sasquatch) Porter, a leader in the Rock Machine. A few days later, Kane said Boucher and Steinert chased André (Frisé, or “Curly”) Sauvageau, another member of the Rock Machine, along Highway 40 until they spotted two Sûreté du Québec vehicles. With these bravado acts, Steinert appeared to be gaining Boucher's respect.